Canadian Finance, Economics and Fiscal Analysis
The site was down for quite a few hours apparently because of some database corruption. Using some wizardry that I haven’t had to use in quite some time (e.g. command prompt restoration of the database backup file) I restored the database and lost the two weekend posts which I recovered out of Google Reader.
Hopefully this wasn’t a result of a directed hack attack or anything.
Continuing some large-cap cursory scanning, I notice that Amazon is still at its very lofty valuation – I have no idea why they are trading so highly, but then again, that’s been the case for quite some time.
Whenever I look at Amazon I instinctively punch in Walmart. They have been in a trading range for most of last decade, but interestingly enough, they’ve appeared to have broken out of their trading range:
Back in the early 2000′s, Walmart was trading a very healthy P/E (around 20-25) and they had to settle into their valuation by actually earning enough in earnings to warrant the price. A few years ago they were around the 10-11 future-looking P/E range, while now they have crept up to 14 times future earnings. Is this because capital that was otherwise earmarked toward fixed income investments has moved into the equity side? Walmart equity is as close to a GDP-linked bond-like instrument as you could have gotten in the large cap market and I am wondering if others are seeing it this way?
Walmart is pretty much the economic barometer of the US retail economy and the other explanation is that maybe the US economy is recovering or stronger than the media makes it out to be?
I also notice that Target has exhibited a similar boost this year, albeit somewhat less pronounced than Walmart.
I’m not interested in investing in large cap companies, but they are interesting to look at a superficial level. Sometimes this superficial analysis gets me very close to actually purchasing large cap companies (e.g. I thought Starbucks was a good purchase around $12/share back in late 2008/early 2009 when it was going through its coffee crisis during the economic crisis – I never did purchase them simply because there were so many other alluring securities trading at dirt cheap prices at this time).
Getting back to the original topic, looking at trailing 12 month P/Es (after subtracting net cash balances of both companies), Microsoft is at 12.1 and Google is at 15.9. So Microsoft is about a quarter cheaper than Google, just based on past earnings values.
Intuitively, Google looks like a much cheaper investment than Microsoft when you plug the question into your mind “Which company will be more relevant five years from now?”, or you can also use the more direct variant “Which company will grow its earnings more in five years from now?”. Both companies are in the revenue range ($74 billion for Microsoft and $43 billion for Google) where the law of large numbers is evoked – long gone are the days of 40% growth.
This is a fairly elementary analysis, but a hypothetical decision to invest a dollar in Google vs. a dollar in Microsoft is an easy decision. Google is probably the better medium term play.
However, I wouldn’t discount Microsoft’s chances too heavily – when I look at my own computing habits, I still see myself using a Microsoft operating system most of the time, and also Microsoft Office.
On this note of stickiness, as long as Yahoo doesn’t screw up their finance portal by adding in features which are utterly useless (e.g. how their news services are not filterable by content provider), I still find it to be my main “standby” webpage for just getting quick metrics on companies. I don’t know how they were able to be so sticky, but they way they present public information is a touch better than the others, including Google. If it wasn’t for Yahoo Finance, I’d find them to be completely useless.
Rosetta Stone (NYSE: RST) posted their second quarter results today and they were below analyst estimates by a fair chunk.
Investors should keep in mind the company is still in the middle of a turnaround process to get costs down and restore some semblance of profitability while keeping their main product line viable in the world of freely offered software. The current CEO is new to the position, but has been with the company as their CFO prior to being promoted to CEO. They are trying to optimize the revenue stream and milk it for what it is worth, and this is going to be a lumpy process as they figure out what is and what is not working – keep in mind that sales and marketing has crept up from 45.5% of revenues in 2009 to 50.6% in 2010 and 60.2% in 2011; assuming you can ratchet down this ratio without adversely affecting the top line, you will be adding significant incremental profit to the bottom line. It just isn’t going to be done in a quarter.
The stock will probably get hammered about 15% in Thursday’s trading and I will consider adding to my position if it goes to the single digits.
Keep in mind that the company does have $120 million cash on the balance sheet and at Wednesday’s closing price of $13.13/share, this does make an enterprise value of $156 million. This is sure to go lower on Thursday. When you consider this is a software company with a quarter billion in sales a year, this seems to be relatively cheap, albeit in a business that is not going to grow like a weed.
I always get puzzled at articles that claim that retail investors are getting turned off the market because of high frequency trading.
If you are an active trader in the market (i.e. your sole method of generating returns is through the relatively frequent buying and selling of stocks) then I can see how that is the case. You are perpetually front-runned by computers and it is the financial equivalent of getting bitten by mosquitoes.
For most investors, computer trading doesn’t make a difference at all. The only two impacts are if you are trading on margin and some sort of “flash crash” triggers a margin call on your account, and the second impact is if you are planning on making an entry below a certain price or an exit above a certain price and you get your limit order hit.
When establishing positions in less-than-liquid stocks, however, getting front-runned is a pain in the ass and is an unavoidable cost of trading. My suggestion would be to keep order sizes microscopic to average volume and accumulate when somebody is distributing (or vice versa if your task is to exit). Another method is to wait for the company to have a poor quarterly earnings report (that does not reflect a fundamental change in your perception of the business) and when the stock gets hammered, start accumulating in measured steps. There is no science to this – the shares you want to be accumulating at the bid, somebody wants to be selling to you at the asking price and there are times when you see a ask of a sufficient size that it is just worth putting in the limit buy order at the asking price.
In general, unless if you are employing some sort of mechanical algorithm, people that trade more often than not will have worse performance.